Laura Letinsky’s photography has evolved from studies in melancholy and absence to subtle, yet surprising, explorations of perception, color and space. The Denver Art Museum (DAM), in collaboration with the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York, present Laura Letinsky: Still Life Photographs, 1997–2012. Wavering between flatness and volume, story and metaphor, the selection of 17 photographs contain mysteries that challenge viewers to keep looking and asking questions about how we see. This survey exhibition traces the paths Letinsky followed in her work from the late 1990s until today and is included in general admission.
“Letinsky is an important mid-career artist who is pushing the boundaries of traditional photography,” said Eric Paddock, photography curator at the DAM. “On one level, the objects in her earlier photographs are simply things anyone might see. But they also have, or suggest, symbolic meanings that blur the line between reality and something mysterious. Although we never see Letinsky or other people, their presence—or maybe their absence—hovers around the photographs.”
Many of Letinsky’s pictures describe the remnants of daily life—left over food, silverware and napkins. The soft light and delicate colors invite viewers to approach her work, where they discover unexpected shifts of scale and playful illusions of space.
These qualities are most pronounced in Letinsky’s work from 2010–2012, in which she abandons traditional concepts of space all together, and chooses instead to tape, pin or glue cut-out images of food and other objects to large sheets of paper—which she then photographs. This latest work crosses into territory where the usual lines between real and imagined worlds are not only blurred, but tied into puzzling knots. The exhibition will travel to the University of Manitoba School of Art Gallery at the University of Manitoba in Canada in 2013. Other Canadian venues will be announced.
Canadian-born Laura Letinsky is a professor at the University of Chicago, Department of Visual Arts. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada in 1986, and her Masters of Fine Arts degree from Yale University School of Art in 1991. Monographs of her work include After All (Damiani Publishers, Italy, 2010); Now, Again (Galerie Kusseneers, Antwerp, 2005); Hardly More Than Ever (The Renaissance Society, Chicago, 2004); and Venus Inferred (University of Chicago Press, 2000). Past exhibitions of her work have been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Casino Luxembourg, the Museum of Modern Art, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, New York.
EXHIBITION
Laura Letinsky, Still Life Photographs, 1997–2012
October 28, 2012 – March 24, 2013
The Denver Art Museum
13th Avenue
Denver, CO
USA
